Meanwhile in North Korea…
Dictating the curriculum from on high.
A hallmark of an authoritarian movement is that it tries to use its power to impose accepted views of reality itself onto a broader population. If existence itself is at odds with ideology, then it must be existence that has gotten it wrong.
And so I give you this memo from the Chancellor of Texas Tech University, a man who clearly wants to erase from our minds, as much as he can, the existence of LGBTQ+ persons. Here’s the Fox News write-up: Texas Tech to recognize only two sexes, freezes gender programs.
Texas Tech University has announced it will recognize only two sexes, male and female, and freeze all gender programming related to sexual orientation and gender identity(SOGI).
An April 9 memo from Texas Tech said the Lubbock university would recognize “only two human sexes” and, following a program review, “initiate the closure of all academic credentials centered on SOGI.”
The announcement came after the Texas Tech University System implemented a formal review process for course content in December 2025 to ensure compliance with state and federal laws, with materials evaluated by the Board of Regents.
The December memo, signed by Brandon Creighton, chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, said that the December review was part of oversight obligation under Senate Bill 37, which passed in June. It is authored by Creighton, who is also a Republican state senator, which increased state oversight of college curriculum and governance.
The April announcement says that in addition to freezing all gender programming related to SOGI, there will be a “strict prohibition on SOGI content in all core and lower-level undergraduate courses, requiring alternate materials if primary texts center on or include these topics. Conversely, upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses are restricted but feature clear exemptions for strictly defined academic purposes.”
As Erin in the Morning rightly notes:
The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it. An English professor assigning Oscar Wilde cannot lead a discussion of the trial and imprisonment that defined his later work and legacy. A professor teaching Virginia Woolf’s Orlando—a novel whose entire premise is gender fluidity—would appear to be in direct violation of the policy. A core literature class reading Walt Whitman’s “Calamus” poems could not explore their homoerotic themes. Sappho—the ancient Greek poet from whom the word “lesbian” derives—could not be taught with any meaningful analysis of her work’s content. A professor teaching Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or As You Like It could not discuss the cross-dressing that is central to the plot, nor the long theatrical tradition of male actors performing female roles—because analyzing gender performance in Shakespeare would constitute allocating “instructional time” to gender identity themes. A political science class could not examine the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges as anything other than a passing reference. A psychology professor in a core course could not discuss why homosexuality was removed from the DSM. Even a music appreciation course discussing Tchaikovsky or Freddie Mercury would need to avoid any sustained discussion of how their identities shaped their art.
I don’t think any of this is hyperbole. A friend who teaches intro to American government made the same observation on Facebook the other day about this memo and Obergefell. As someone who taught countless hours of that course over my lifetime, I concur. Nothing on the gay rights movement, nothing on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, nothing on the Defense of Marriage Act, nor, indeed, anything that anti-trans sentiments were relevant to recent elections or the politics of the memo issued by Texas Tech’s president.
Erin also notes:
Perhaps most draconian of all are the policies targeting graduate students. Under the memo, graduate students will be permanently barred from writing theses or dissertations centered on LGBTQ+ topics once current teach-out programs conclude. This is the first policy at any major American university system that extends content censorship to student work itself—not even Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which restricted classroom instruction in K-12 schools, attempted to dictate what students could write about in their own research. The memo states that “graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception, explicitly limited to currently enrolled students completing their degrees within formally identified teach-out programs,” and that “upon the conclusive termination of all designated teach-out programs, no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics.”
This is probably an unnecessary rule insofar as I can’t imagine a graduate student interested in these topics seeking admission to Tech at this point. Indeed, I suspect persons interested in graduate study in history, literature, or any social science to think twice about applying to Tech at this point. Or, for that matter, biology.
To slightly rewrite a famous line from Pink Floyd: We don’t need no education, we need thought control.
The Chancellor at Texas Tech is telling faculty that they have to ignore reality. Think of it this way: if trans persons aren’t real, what are the anti-trans advocates so up in arms about? That is to say that a core job of a university is to make honest inquiries that help us understand the world we live in. Gay people exist. Trans people exist. Their histories exist. The very memo that the Chancellor issued is the kind of thing that will be examined by academics and will be part of curricula as soon as the Fall (if it hasn’t been discussed in class already). Give him this: he just made history.
Maybe if politicians and bureaucrats had better educations in history and the social sciences, they wouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes…
It is utterly antithetical to the existence of an institution of higher education to make topics verboten for study, except in extreme cases.*
By the way: if, as advocates of these kinds of rules insist, trans persons are fictional, as they assert, because gender is ultimately biological, based on very specific physical traits, why do they have to use extreme measures to get that point of view inserted into curricula? The threat that so many people feel from the mere existence and discussion of trans people is off the charts. Understanding is what is needed, but shutting down academic inquiry is the direct opposite of understanding, now isn’t it?
And, again, gay people are real. Just putting your fingers in the ears of students and over the mouths of faculty does not erase a substantial portion of the human race.
FIRE has weighed in as well: Texas Tech censors sex and gender courses.
Banning classes in whole areas of inquiry raises obvious academic freedom concerns. But while one can imagine a college that simply lacks classes “centered on” those topics — many certainly exist — Texas Tech’s guidance goes way past simply being bad for academic freedom and straight to being unworkable at any college or university dedicated to a liberal education.
Texas Tech’s guidance prohibits instructors from teaching that gender identity is fluid, that there are more than two genders, or that gender is distinct from biological sex. (Sorry, Plato!) In core undergraduate courses, “incidental references” to sex and gender content are to be avoided when discussing primary materials for core courses. If course material does include such content? Instructors “must not highlight, assess, or allocate instructional time to it” — with no exceptions.
Forget walking on eggshells. Faculty now need to walk across the verbal equivalent of broken glass if they dare include material that could conceivably violate these rules. If a student asks a question that mentions sex or gender? Be sure not to “assess” the question!
The guidance does make exceptions for upper-level courses, but they are not much better. Analysis of “primary works” is permitted only if it is “strictly objective” and “lacks advocacy for contemporary matters.” If any discussion of sex or gender is linked to a historical figure or event, faculty may teach about that event or figure, but must not include “contemporary . . . advocacy.” Good luck sorting all of that out, faculty members.
The notion that sexual orientation and gender topics are so dangerous that they have to be constrained this way is absurd to the nth degree.
As someone who spent a career in higher education, all this saddens and angers me.
*One can likely think of things that would not be appropriate for a curriculum, such as: How to be a Terrorist 101 wherein students are literally taught how to be a terrorist, including a final project of blowing up a building (I could actually see a real course called “How to be a Terrorist” that was actually an academic inquiry into terrorism, a legiitimate areas of study, with a the provocative title to get student;s attention). We would all agree (or so I would hope) that a class that taught that the Earth is flat shouldn’t exist. But you know how almost all of those kinds of things are typically handled? By faculty-led curriculum committees staffed with experts in their fields.
It’s more like intentionally polluting a river with toxic chemicals for no reason other than science being biased against toxic chemicals. Texas Tech is going to suffer and anyone who is raised in a similar environment where you can’t talk about trans people or gay people or even like how masculinity or femininity can be negotiated is going to suffer. But you don’t have to live around the river if you can afford not to.
Knowing different people, and even knowing about different people, makes bigotry that much harder to accept.
Demonizing LGBTQ+ people didn’t work. Now they’re trying this.
Typically conservatives wish to enforce conformity while liberals, conservative whining about cancel culture aside, wish to allow diversity. (Cancel culture is not an act of government.) I was trying to come up with a left equivalent to the Texas Tech thing. Closest I came up with was Colorado’s anti-conversion therapy law. Inexact, as it banned an action, not discussion. (OK, murky, as the action is carried out verbally, like real therapy.) And the Supremes, in their infinite wisdom, struck down the CO law on 1A grounds. I wait with bated breath to see if the principle will hold.